Outside of Japan, Senkichi Taniguchi is most likely best known as the director of Toshiro Mifune’s debut film Snow Trail, or else as the screenwriter of one of Akira Kurosawa’s lesser known works The Silent Duel. Yet throughout the 1960s, he also made a series of silly comedies including Wild Ducks and Green Onions (カモとねぎ, Kamo to Negi), an absurd crime caper revolving around a gentleman thief’s attempts to plot the perfect crime while assisted by two bumbling henchmen and a young woman with a hidden agenda.
The film’s Japanese title is likely inspired by a proverb, “a duck comes carrying an onion” which means something close to “there’s a sucker born every minute” though it might be up for debate who exactly is the sucker here. In any case, dapper mastermind Nobukichi (Masayuki Mori) has plotted the perfect heist which involves rigging a speedboat race by nobbling the propellers on two of the four boats and then betting accordingly. So far so good, but the enigmatic Mami (Mako Midori) has been watching their every move and is able to swipe the bag containing the money before henchmen Yosuke (Hideo Sunazuka) and Kyuhei (Tadao Takashima) can return it to their boss who for once has agreed to an equal split. The guys eventually track her down, but she tells them she spent the money on bail for her husband but it turns out he left the police station with two other women and hasn’t been seen since. The gang then determine to track him down to get the money back, but become involved in several other scams along the way.
Despite having been able to rob them blind, all the men seem to be under the impression that Mami is a brainless airhead though she later reveals herself to speak fluent English and in fact comes up with a few scams of her own that are better than Nobukichi’s whom the guys refer to as “Cap’n”. Nevertheless, the guys only tolerate her because they need to find her husband though all’s not quite as it seems. Kyuhei in particular seems to have a rather misogynistic streak and is somewhat jealous that Nobukichi gets to have Mami to himself though he remains a perfect gentleman, sleeping on the sofa and giving her the bed. But it’s Kyuhei’s lascivious nature that eventually gets them into trouble when he tries to drag a reluctant Yosuke into a cinema screening pink films only to be pulled aside by some kind of anti-delinquency brigade who read off some unconvincing statistics stating that 80% of young male sex offenders are fans of pink films.
This annoys them so much they decide to scam the organiser, Tomiko (Hisano Yamaoka), by appealing to her vanity and tricking her association, which is dedicated to conservative family values, into watching (and apparently enjoying) a porn film on school premises believing it to be an “educational movie”. Tomiko in some senses represents the forces of order against which the gang are rebelling, though she’ll get her revenge in time. In any case, they find a more worthy target after travelling to a seaside town and encountering the daughter of a man who has been poisoned by industrial pollution while the local factory insists everything is within “safe limits” and they aren’t the cause of the sickness spreading across the area.
Conducting another expert heist to steal the secret documents to prove otherwise, Nobukichi could make a lot of money blackmailing the factory owner but instead gives the report to the man’s daughter so she can pursue justice and compensation for her father much to the chagrin of Mami and proving that it isn’t all about the money after all. Then again, he has another document that, once translated by Mami, reveals the factory has actually been producing Napalm for the Americans which is a bit of a grey area as far as the constitution is concerned. This time, they play a nasty trick on the heartless factory owner (Eijiro Tono) though he is hardly remorseful and in fact was too greedy to pay their blackmail money despite the vast sums it would cost him if the news ever got out.
Despite its silliness and absurdity, the film takes an ironic swipe at serious issues of the day such as scandals like the Minamata disease and Mary Whitehouse-esque social campaigners ranting about a decline in morals while simultaneously enjoying the platform that protesting them grants them. In some ways, the gang themselves exist as a kind of rebellion against the salaryman society with their various scams presented as silly games targeting faceless or ridiculous figures who can either afford to lose the money or were ripe for a comeuppance though in the end, crime doesn’t really pay either and the gang find themselves hoist by their own petards, robbed of enjoying their ill-gotten gains by unexpected twists of fate. Very much of its time the film has a kind of charm in its whimsical score and pastel colours but has lingering darkness in its threats of unexploded bombs and hidden Okinawan torture facilities in a society increasingly ruled by amoral capitalists.
Windows on Worlds 